Federated services have always had privacy issues but I expected Lemmy would have the fewest, but it’s visibly worse for privacy than even Reddit.
- Deleted comments remain on the server but hidden to non-admins, the username remains visible
- Deleted account usernames remain visible too
- Anything remains visible on federated servers!
- When you delete your account, media does not get deleted on any server
while this is certainly feasible, it is just a compliance checkmark of “doing your best”. It wouldn’t actually prevent someone attempting to persist that data. For example, I just need to maintain an insert-only copy of my deletion-compliant lemmy instance DB, and none of the deletions would be reflected on that.
I could then host that copy publicly on some unrelated lemmy instance, and without systematically de-federating from all other instances, you wouldn’t know which one was retaining the data.